He leaves behind a city more at peace with itself, and with its police force

ON MAY 1st 1992, two days after Los Angeles was engulfed by violence that was to leave more than 50 people dead, thousands hurt and damage to property worth up to $1 billion, Rodney King appeared on television hunched over a microphone to issue a plea to the city that had reared him. “Can we all get along?” he asked haltingly, his voice cracking with emotion. After all, he added, “We're all stuck here for a while.”

Mr King is no longer stuck here. Early on June 17th his fiancée found his body in the swimming pool at the house the couple shared in Rialto, a small city east of Los Angeles. Rumours spread quickly that he had been drinking heavily; Mr King had struggled with alcohol for most of his life. He had been boozed up when he tried to outrun pursuing LAPD officers on Interstate 210 on March 3rd 1991; when they caught up with him, they reacted to his aggressive behaviour by doling out a vicious attack that a witness happened to capture on camera. The footage was broadcast around the world, and so it was not only Los Angeles that was shocked when, over a year later, an all-white jury failed to find any of the four officers caught on tape guilty of assault. Two hours later, the violence began.

The night of Mr King's beating was “the end of the old imperial LAPD”, says Connie Rice, a prominent civil-rights lawyer in the city. Back then not only was the force riddled with racism, it operated as a quasi-autonomous paramilitary law-enforcement agency accountable to no one, least of all the civilians it was supposed to be protecting. An independent commission created in the wake of the King beating issued a devastating report on the violent conduct of the force; this marked the moment when the police lost the support of the elite, says Ms Rice. But it took many more years, several more police chiefs and yet more scandal before the LAPD turned itself into a force that racial minorities could trust.

The biggest trigger for change in the LAPD, says Lou Cannon, a veteran journalist who wrote a book on the King case, was not the notorious videotape of Mr King's beating but the LAPD's ill-prepared, incompetent response to the outbreak of unrest. Many people had instinctively sided with the officers. But they turned against the police “when they saw that they could not protect them”, says Mr Cannon.

The slow transformation of the LAPD was not the only change wrought by the riots. The city's Koreans, many of them shopkeepers who bore the brunt of the looting and the damage to property, began to play a more active role in local politics. “Some of these guys remember the riots like they were yesterday,” says Mr Cannon. Other changes were promised but did not come to pass: many of the areas hit hardest by the violence have seen little of the city largesse that was pledged to them in the aftermath.

Angelenos wanted to see in Rodney King a story of personal redemption to mirror the civic one they had witnessed. He seemed sometimes to suggest that he could provide it: “The Riot Within”, the memoir he published in April to mark the 20th anniversary of the riots, was subtitled “My journey from rebellion to redemption”. He told journalists that at last he was getting his life back on track. But the sips he took from a hip flask during interviews told another tale. Ultimately he was unable to bear a burden he had never sought to carry. His own life was a different American story, of addiction, waste and neglect. But his legacy is public, and profound.